On the occasion of our daughter’s Bat Mitzvah

Most of the time, my life is quite ordinary. I type into my computer and rearrange words. Chauffeur my daughter around. Bake chicken. Fish into my pockets for exact change when I’m buying a medium coffee at Stewart’s.

But this past Saturday something extraordinary happened. My daughter rose to the podium at Temple Sinai in Saratoga. She got up before a crowd and sang in Hebrew, reading from words hand-scribed on animal parchment. Friends and family, some of whom spoke only Spanish, joined in song after traveling from as far away as Colombia. The whole time she wore a ritual prayer shawl, or tallis, made by my wife, who reached well beyond her Catholic upbringing to make it. My daughter underwent her rite of passage under the watchful guidance of Rabbis Linda and Jonathan, one of the few wife-husband rabbi teams in the world.

Duarte Image

I gave a speech after the service. I told the 70-odd attendees how proud I was proud to be her father, friend and, yes, her chauffeur. How she led the prayer service in a voice so clear and strong I could hear her heart filling the room. How in her “D’Var Torah,” her commentary on the Torah reading, she managed to explain a potentially depressing Torah passage (filled with phrases such as “I shall heap your carcasses upon your lifeless fetishes”) in a positive light. How it’s not just Torah she shines a light on, sees the positive in. The way she fills our house with her music, her piano playing, makes me feel like I live in a jazz club. How she spends hours lovingly illustrating a single picture or shaping a sculpture from clay, and her whimsical creations brighten every wall and corner of our house. How her laughter and wit delight all who know her.

Duarte Image

How she’s lit up our lives in so many ways. From the very start. I flashed back to her baby naming twelve years ago when we lived in a fourth-floor walkup in Brooklyn. We chose the Hebrew name Talya, which translates to “dew” – the sweet wetness you find in the morning grass. It reminds us of renewal of hope after the darkness. We chose that name because our daughter was the light that lit our darkness – born at the same time I was undergoing chemotherapy. How today, we are so proud, her mother and I, to be her parents, her friend, and her chauffeur. And so we promise to always stand by her side, in the same way she’s been there for us, in every possible way.

Sometimes life boils down to a simple question, one with far-reaching repercussions. For Hannibal it was: Should I sneak forty elephants and fifty thousand men across the Alps to try to defeat the Romans? In the same way, amid the insane preparations for my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah, I sometimes asked a question of myself: “Is all this craziness worth it?”

The correct answer to both questions, of course, is Yes. Our daughter rocked. Or, more accurately, she rocked my world. Life may go back to normal, but the magic and meaning of that day will be a place we will frequently return to affirm that life is more than baking chicken and letting the dogs out in the back. It’s also about chauffeuring.